Miha Fras has been a photographer for over twenty years. With his camera, he entered the stage and its world of performance art and devoted himself to documenting dance performances of the majority of Slovenian contemporary dance creators, and took up dance photography. He has been also a long-standing photojournalist of the magazine Mladina, portrait photographer of the magazine Literature and photographer for the City Municipality of Ljubljana. He has been displaying his author work at individual and group exhibitions.

The author called his current exhibition the “Hidden language” after the quote of the famous American choreographer Martha Graham, stating that “dance is the hidden language of the soul”.

Whereas the producers often have to submit classical documentary photographs for the promotion of dance performances to the media in order that they may get them published, a photographer’s ambition is not a flawless reproduction of the performed movement, but rather a creation of a good dance photograph – a photograph that will convey the dynamics, emotions and meaning through the special features offered by the photographic medium. Photographing dance represents a special creative challenge to the photographer: how to transcend the eternal paradox between dance, which is movement, and photograph, which is a motionless image; how to catch the right moment, stop the time and discern the hidden language of the soul in order to convey “something more” that will remain recorded on the paper forever, in contrast to the dance which will vanish once it has been danced.

Miha Fras decided to exhibit dance photographs from different dance performances that had been taken over the period of twenty years. In them he has looked for the hidden language of the soul. Many of the photographs have never been published before.

Živa Brecelj